Jorge Luis Borges in The Library of Babel imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. The librarian who narrates this story describes five books that appear among the shelves that he has visited.

Christian Bök has rediscovered these volumes in the hexagonal tenements of the Library of Babel (curated by Jonathan Basile). The five books conform to the specifications described by Borges: 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. Bök has typeset each book in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the ‘prisoner’s constraint,’ such that no letter has an ascender or a descender).

Each of the original editions has appeared in print, limited to 25 copies for sale, after which the books have vanished forever. Each book appears here in a digital edition available, as a gift, for bibliophiles who love the work of Borges.